Prof Mark Bailey, Director, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

I’m Professor Mark Bailey director of NERC
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. I would say that delivering strong independent
science is at the heart of the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology. I’m extremely
proud of our record in world leading environmental research. providing the
scientific evidence for policy makers who make the decisions that affect our
everyday lives. We work with universities, governments, charities, businesses and
indeed other research institutes to undertake the research necessary to
measure our environmental legacy. CEH’s research has huge impacts across many
sectors: our flood risk models are used to make decisions that can save lives
and property. We work up to and beyond the landscape scale, for example our
biodiversity research helps the enhancement of wildlife in the
countryside and deliver environmental friendly farming practices; our pollution
and air quality research helps tackle environmental risk across the globe;
we’ve helped in establishing water quality targets across the EU; our
research has helped improve irrigation methods in parts of the world that are
water stressed to support sustainable development; we undertake large-scale
long-term monitoring of the environment. These datasets are critical for
understanding environmental change and understanding the hazards we face in
society. The future direction of research at CEH
is an exciting but challenging one. I firmly believe that the best is yet to
come. This is how I feel about the Centre for
Ecology & Hydrology, an organization of high scientific integrity and research
excellence that is able to bring together the many disciplines required
to understand the complexities of the Earth’s system. But this pure research
must have a practical endpoint and here we provide the evidence base and
knowledge needed for managing our land and water to sustain nature and human
well-being. In short we are key players promoting the NERC strategy, Business
of the Environment